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Comment by MarkusWandel | Hacker News Reader

Only a quick skim, and - hey I'm in Canada, so I can still talk about gender issues, right? What about "born into the wrong body" types? Who always felt they belong in the other gender and eventually transition? I guess it would be hard to test at scale, but would they at birth already exhibit the "other gender" behaviour patterns?

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The differences observed are at the population level. That means there is HUGE overlap between the two populations and you can’t distinguish any data point as being a girl or a boy. Only that the populations have a different average or range. For a visual representation check out [1].

This kind of thing shows up all over the place in all fields of research. It’s why for example although you can see immune system differences at a population level between patients with disease X and healthy controls, you can’t in any way use it as a biomarker for an individual who might have disease X.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13293-026-00976-9...

This would be incredibly hard to test because you'd have to have the results of the study and then wait a few decades to see who ends up identifying as transgender. Also the amount of transgender people is a small fraction of the population so you'd need a larger total sample size for the same statistical significance.

My experience interacting with transgender people is that transgender men and cisgender women have a lot of things in common and visa versa, so I would expect this to follow that pattern, but it would be interesting to see it studied.

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